rsync and outrage
medium.com
I gave up blogging a long time ago (apart from an occasional thing about ArduPilot), I tend to just write code and hope people find it…

Seems like he’s been pushed into using LLMs as a way to cope with the deluge of LLM-generated security reports.

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
    0·
    7 hours ago

    But where will the maintainers for these alternatives come from, when barely anybody has stepped up in the 30 years of rsync’s existence?

    Universal Healthcare would increase the pool of willing developers by an order of magnitude here.

    • fruitcantfly@programming.dev
      0·
      6 hours ago

      Universal Healthcare would increase the pool of willing developers by an order of magnitude here.

      I’m not so sure. The problem is not a lack of developers. The problem is a lack of developers interested in working on rsync, or on any other specific project you can name. Most developers would rather work on their own projects.

      I would also question whether or not universal healthcare (though unquestionably a good thing) would actually result in such an increase in available developers. The following study looked at the geographical distribution of OSS developers in 2021, via Github contributions, and found that the US had a similar number of OSS developers per capita compared to similar countries that do have universal healthcare (see table 2):

      https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162522000105

      • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
        0·
        6 hours ago

        Github and the whole culture that it came out of it used to (it feels sooooo good to say that in the past tense) be globally hinged on Silicon Valley, why would you not expect to see a anomalously high number of US developers on it?

        • fruitcantfly@programming.dev
          0·
          5 hours ago

          That’s definitely a possibility, along with the possibility that countries with worse English language skills might be underrepresented on GitHub, despite having universal healthcare. Conversely, if the US is over-represented on GitHub, then the pool of US developers who are not already active on GitHub may also be depleted compared to other countries. However, that is not something we can read out of the available evidence.

          The most we can conclude is probably that the US getting universal healthcare might result in an increase in available OSS developers, depending on which assumptions turn out to be correct, but suggesting that it would lead to an order of magnitude increase is surely premature

        • Zos_Kia@jlai.lu
          0·
          6 hours ago

          Oh man I’m like super agreeing with you. Also I’m in a place that actually has universal healthcare, so it’s not like it’s unworkable